ASPs (application service providers) have been on the scene for about two years now. During that time, their early, almost exclusive, focus on ERP applications has expanded to include everything from e-mail to business intelligence. These applications are offered on a pay-as-you-go rental basis, which slashes the initial investment required to begin using them.

There were a number of interesting announcements at Java One and I'll be considering various different ones and their implications in upcoming few weeks.

When we are behind schedule, we often compound our problems by acting like we're behind schedule. The trouble is, we're behind schedule and don't realize what we are doing. There are, however, things we can do to break this downward spiral.

In discussions of the disruptive impact of the Internet on established business, the question is often asked, "Well, what about the railroads?" The implication is that the railroads apparently failed either to anticipate or to embrace the impact on transportation that airlines would ultimately have, much of that impact at the expense of the railroads.

As most readers know, Sun has moved away from supporting the Java language, as such, and prefers to create packages that include not only the Java Virtual Machine (Interpreter) and the basic classes to support the Java language, but also classes to support a wide variety of interface and data access functions, Enterprise JavaBean (EJB) and EJB components, applets, servlets, and IIOP, as well as a variety of utilit

You've seen it -- workshop attendance has been shrinking, as has class length. The likelihood that the participants that showed up at the start will be there when the evaluations are passed out is slim to none. This year, if you're a training manager, you had to cancel an increasing number of classes that are on your schedule.

There has been substantial but patchy take-up of software process improvement (SPI) throughout the last decade.

In early 1999 there was quite a bit of discussion about a new technology called the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). SOAP was developed by a group of people closely associated with Microsoft, and it quickly received Microsoft's blessing. SOAP is not an official part of Microsoft's Distributed Network Architecture (DNA 2000), COM+, or Windows 2000.

After presenting a seminar on software inspections at a client site recently, I asked the development manager about his plans for implementing these practices in his group. He confessed a reluctance to set ambitious expectations for his team.

Electronic business is often innovative, involving significant change in conventional business models that have been slowly established over the last few decades. Such organizations are lean, often cutting out middlemen and selling direct to the end customer, running new paradigms, or adapting old ones to another medium.

Three weeks ago, in the Architecture/e-Business E-Mail Advisor, I considered some of the issues involved in outsourcing IT services. I suggested that a company would probably want to use packaged applications or outsource everything that wasn't strategic to the company as it shifted to e-commerce and the Internet.

Several years ago, while a software development lead, I was introduced to the concept of automated software testing. Just point, click, and record the test cases, the vendor promised. Their tool would, we were told, quickly accumulate a huge collection of automated test cases that would dutifully execute unattended.